The particular revelations in Washington State illustrate a general threat; once you have cut a hole in due process of law for terrorists, others will be stuck into it. The anti-war protesters were exercising their constitutionally-guaranteed freedoms of peaceful assembly and of free speech. Yet some low-level investigator abridged their rights by reclassifying them as terrorist suspects. That is an outrage, but should be no surprise. It will happen again anywhere that these loopholes are cut.

Barry Haskell Levine

Defendant Added to Protesters’ Spying Suit

Published: June 24, 2013An investigator working with an intelligence-gathering office in Washington State placed the names and photos of antiwar protest organizers into a domestic terrorism file, according to an amended complaint filed on Monday with the Federal District Court in Tacoma.

Those papers added the investigator as a defendant in a lawsuit that began in 2010 after it emerged that John J. Towery, a civilian employee of the Army, had used a fake name to infiltrate and spy on antiwar groups. Much of the case has been based on a continuing series of public information requests filed by activists, which have yielded hundreds of pages of documents.

The investigator, Chris Adamson, was described by plaintiffs as a member of the Pierce County Sheriff’s Department and a director of regional intelligence groups with the Washington Joint Analytical Center, which became the Washington State Fusion Center, one of dozens of counterterrorism offices financed by the Department of Homeland Security.

Mr. Adamson helped coordinate Mr. Towery’s spying efforts and listed at least four protesters in a “national domestic terrorist database with pictures, and identifying personal information along with false claims alleging a propensity for violence,” the lawsuit said.

Lawrence A. Hildes, a lawyer for the plaintiffs, said the database was controlled by the Washington State Patrol.

“They have taken upon themselves to say, ‘We don’t like this person, therefore he’s a domestic terrorist,’ ” Mr. Hildes said. “It’s not only illegal — it’s absolutely chilling.”

Mr. Adamson did not return a phone call seeking comment. Bob Calkins, a spokesman for the Washington State Patrol, who also spoke on behalf of the fusion center, said there was no indication that either group was currently using the domestic terrorism index described in the lawsuit.

“We do our best to separate lawless behavior from lawful protest,” he said, adding: “Today we would be very careful in vetting information — is this someone who is truly a terrorist?”

Other defendants in the case include Mr. Towery, formerly a criminal intelligence analyst at Joint Base Lewis-McChord, near Tacoma; his former supervisor at the base, Thomas R. Rudd; and several police officials from Tacoma and Olympia, who are said in the lawsuit to have impeded protests against the war in Iraq. Law enforcement officials have said that some of those protests became unruly and dangerous.

Over the past four years, public information requests have elicited a trove of documents, including handwritten notes from Mr. Towery, e-mails between law enforcement officers and detailed analyses of protesters.

In 2009, an activist, Brendan Maslauskas Dunn, received documents from the City of Olympia showing that Mr. Towery had spied on organizations like Students for a Democratic Society and Port Militarization Resistance, which aimed to disrupt military shipments. Further information about the surveillance came after Tim Smith, then the chairman of the Bill of Rights Defense Committee of Tacoma, received records from that city.

More recently, an activist named Drew Hendricks and others obtained documents that provided information about the domestic terrorism index.

Those materials included a letter to law enforcement officials from a captain in the Washington State Patrol about a domestic terrorism workshop scheduled for 2007. The captain wrote that his agency would distribute an “intelligence document” containing information about “extremist activities” provided by attendees and added that “a blank index entry form is enclosed for submission of information on activists that you will be sharing.”

Other material included two documents with the heading “2007 Domestic Terrorism Conference Index Entry Form” that named Mr. Dunn and a fellow protester, Jeffrey A. Berryhill. Mr. Adamson was listed as a “submitting officer” on the forms, which showed photographs of Mr. Dunn and Mr. Berryhill, identified them as members of Students for a Democratic Society, and included their addresses, employers and Social Security numbers.

The forms described Mr. Dunn and Mr. Berryhill, who are among the plaintiffs suing Mr. Towery and others, as “aggressive during protests and demonstrations” and listed “assault, criminal trespass” under the heading “criminal activity.”

Both men said that they had not assaulted anyone and had no connection to terrorism. Mr. Dunn said he was concerned about the implications of being labeled a domestic terrorist. “Will I not get certain jobs or be allowed to travel to certain places or be detained arbitrarily?” he wondered, adding: “It’s frightening that I’m on a list like that.”